WOLFENBUTTEL  , a

town of Germany, in the duchy of Brunswick, situated on both banks of the Oker, 7 M . S. of Brunswick on the railway to Harzburg . Pop . (1905) 19,083 . Lessing was ducal librarian here, and the old library building, designed in 1723 in imitation of the Pantheon at Rome, contains a marble statue of him . The library, including 300,000 printed books and 1o,000 MSS., was, however, transferred to a large and new Renaissance edifice in 1887 . It is especially rich in Bibles, incunabula and books of the early Reformation period, and contains some fragments of the Gothic bible of Ulfilas . Opposite the old library is the palace, now occupied by a seminary . The ducal burial-vault is in the church of St Mary . A castle is said to have been founded on the site of Wolfenbuttel by a margrave of Meissen about 1046 . When this began in 1267 to be the residence of the early Brunswick or Wolfenbuttel line of counts, a town gradually grew up around it . In 1542 it was taken by the Saxons and Hessians, who, however, evacuated it five years later after the battle of Miihlberg .

In the

Thirty Years' War, in June 1641, the Swedes, under Wrangel and Konigsmark, defeated the Austrians under the archduke Leopold at Wolfenbuttel . The town passed wholly into the possession of the Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel family in 1671, and for nearly one hundred years enjoyed the distinction of being the ducal capital . In 1754, however, Duke Charles transferred the ducal residence to Brunswick . See Voges, Erzahlungen aus der Geschichte der Stadt Wolfenbuttel (Wolfenbuttel, 1882); von Heinemann, Die herzogliche Bibliothek zu Wolfenbuttel (2nd ed., Wolfenbuttel, 1894) . For the " Wolfenbtittel fragments " see LESSING and REIMABUS .